Günter Grass

Alan Riding/The New York Times

News about GÃ¼nter Grass, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Chronology of Coverage

Apr. 13, 2012

Memo From Berlin; controversial Gunter Grass poem criticizing Israel's aggressive posture toward Iran highlights a conundrum for German citizens who oppose Israeli policies but who are reluctant to voice their opinions due to lingering taboos related to their country's bloodstained past. MORE

Apr. 9, 2012

Israel’s interior minister Eli Yishai says that Gunter Grass, a well-known German author, is not welcome in the country because of his controversial poem about the region’s nuclear crisis that accused Israel of being a threat to world peace. MORE

Apr. 7, 2012

Gunter Grass, Germany's most famous living writer, tries to quell controversy over poem he wrote that criticizes Israel, saying he did not mean to make a wholesale attack on the country, but only on the policies of Prime Min Benjamin Netanyahu's government; poem mixes lyrical turns of phrase with discussions of the need for international supervision of both Israel's and Iran's nuclear programs, bluntly calling Israel a threat to world peace for its warnings that it might attack Iran's nuclear facilities. MORE

Senior German Government officials engaged in a public fight today with Gunter Grass, one of the country's best-known writers, over remarks he made criticizing his compatriots as ''closet racists'' in their behavior toward would-be immigrants.

A day of relatively calm literary discussion was shattered yesterday at the International PEN Congress when Gunter Grass forcefully challenged Saul Bellow on his appraisal of the American dream. By the time the session ended, a half-dozen prominent writers, including Nadine Gordimer, Allen Ginsberg, Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag, traded charges and countercharges before an overflow audience.

3:04 p.m. | Updated The German novelist and Nobel laureate Günter Grass has come under intense criticism after publishing a poem saying that Israel, not Iran, was the Mideast's greatest threat to world peace, Der Spiegel Online reported on...

Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author, has sued Random House over a claim in a new biography that he volunteered to serve in the Nazis' Waffen SS unit, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday, citing the online edition of the German magazine...